After 2 heart attacks at age 30, mother urges women to Go Red

January 31, 2013|Alyssa Cutter acutter@tribune.com

It starts as tightening pain in the jaw and neck, moves to the arms, and then slowly expands over the rest of the body. Shortness of breath and nausea are usually soon to follow. These are some of the symptoms of a heart attack, signs that Jacqueline Guzman ignored until it was almost too late.

The Tamarac resident had been living at an apartment in Sunrise last year when she experienced what doctors found to be her second heart attack in a week, something the healthy, 30-year-old single mother of two never expected to happen to her.

"I was in the shower when I started to feel the jaw and neck pain," Guzman said. "It was really weird. I didn't know what was going on. When my arms got really heavy I got out of the shower and went to my room, where my two-year-old daughter asked if I was OK. I managed to drive the kids to school, but when I came back home everything was worse. I couldn't breathe. I was lucky to get a quick breath in, and I was in tears because it was very severe pain."

After four hours of increasing pain, Guzman, who is the student services director at nursing school MedLife Institute, had a friend take her to the hospital. Doctors found one of her main arteries 99 percent blocked.

"The weird thing is, they couldn't find anything wrong with me," she said. "The EKG [electrocardiogram] test came back normal, and I don't have high cholesterol. They didn't know about the blocked artery until they went in for a cardiac catheterization to find out what was going on."

Doctors put in a stent – a tiny, wire-mesh tube – in Guzman's artery to open it up. After spending a week in intensive care, doctors still did not know what caused the heart attacks and sent Guzman home with a personal defibrillator, called a Life Vest, to wear for two months.

Now, almost a year later, Guzman is a volunteer with the American Heart Association's Go Red For Women campaign, and hopes her story will help bring more awareness to how deadly heart disease is, especially to women.

"First and foremost, don't wait for something to happen; get a full checkout," Guzman said. "For young women, stress to doctors how concerned you are and how you want to make sure your heart is fine. Go even beyond EKG. Let them do the echo test and blood work, especially if there is heart disease in the family. I don't even have people close to me in my family who have heart disease, so it's important."

February 1 is the 10th anniversary of the Go Red For Women campaign, and cities across the county, including Sunrise and Tamarac, are proclaiming it as a day to wear red in support of women battling heart disease, according to Annette Watkins, Guzman's fellow volunteer.

"Be your own best advocate with your health," she said. "Read and educate yourself. Insist on different tests. Learn about your body, like what's normal versus not. Become aware of your body and how it reacts to certain situations. Heart disease is the number one killer of women and is more deadly than all forms of cancer combined, but we're trying to stop that."